What Catches Graham Little’s Insides
Published on Elephant, November 2026.Graham Little is served a small chocolate biscuit on a white round plate. It looks like something that should be on the windowsill of one of his intricate gouache paintings. It seems he spends a long time looking out of windows; he is a window-gazing expert, observing and painting blades of grass, roof tiles, and tree trunks with sublimity. Unprompted, he describes one scene over email: a neighbour over the road pulls her baby out of a bin. A car was obscuring his vision, so it may have been out of a pram. But he’s not certain.
After travelling through the darkness of an October evening to meet him, the artificial light of Alison Jacques gallery feels strange. The ceiling is so tall and the paintings so spread out – the space so bright, so evenly lit – that the seams of the corners of the room smooth out and become ill-defined and, while I speak with Little, it almost feels like there is a void surrounding us. Standing together in this white void on a Friday night, we speak about his mother, his love of fashion, his routines, and why it takes him so long to paint.
ALMA FEIGIS: A copy of Vogue found its way into your childhood home in Dundee in the eighties. You loved it, and have since expanded this fascination. Do you feel that this pipeline from those early images to your paintings has been straightforward? Does that initial allure from childhood still affect your practice?
GRAHAM LITTLE: I feel that psychological spaces and effects seem to stay with people, and I do find that the allure of feminine beauty still affects me in a way that is simultaneously too sore... It's definitely not a straightforward subject for me and quite challenging to talk about. But art is good at accommodating that kind of awkward subjectivity.
ALMA: Tell me about fabric in relation to your work.
GRAHAM: That's interesting – that came up last night. When I've done interviews, there’s always been one question that people ask that stumps me, and I could never answer it until about two years ago. People often say, What is it about fabric with you? When they asked it, there was something in my body that was really freaking me out. And then I worked it out, and last night it was confirmed: I was cycling to this show, and I got a new lock. I couldn't work out how to put it on the bike, so I just secured it with little straps on my bike. The lock just sliced through the seam. My mother was raised post-war, so she would completely drum into me that damaging fabric was one of the worst possible things that could be done as a human being. Sometimes, while playing as a boy, I would accidentally cut myself, and she was totally fine with that, me with blood dripping down. But if you tore the fabric on your trousers, she would go mental, and you would get really punished. This is perhaps the reason why I end up painting grass like fabric in the work. It’s not necessarily conceptual, but more of an intuitive thing, I really need to do that, which my paintings mostly are.
ALMA: From what you’ve shared with me, I keep thinking, have you ever been tempted to go into fashion, if you're this affected by it?
GRAHAM: It was crazy at college because I was in fine art, and I couldn't work out which department to go into – you have to choose in Scotland. What I did was, when I was in fine art, I would sometimes go off to the different departments. I’d ask questions of architecture – and they would have such knowledge and perspective – then go to fashion, where the people were so friendly and happy and lively, and music was playing, and everyone had such a high work ethic. I think the nice thing about my work is it allows me to sometimes be a stylist, a fashion designer, incorporate jewellery, and in some ways performance art or sculpture. It allows me to do so much, all at once.
While I was walking today, I saw a beautiful, padded quilt jacket on a Japanese person who had a single ponytail and really lovely, big flared black trousers. Just the colour of it, the combination of it all was just... I think my work is about the confusion of seeing that. And for some reason, for a moment, everything seems to make sense to me. But then afterwards, I'm left confused and kind of shaken. It's a really odd thing. I think that's why the work is sometimes so beautiful, but it also has this edge to it. I think I've found a way to sort of describe that duality. It's all guesswork.
ALMA: As you've said, this show is less of a “looking at beauty and more of a dismantling and looking around it.” Your new paintings move away from the figure to instead consider the spaces and things through which beauty is created, performed and observed. Still lifes are foregrounded. Is this a shift you intentionally moved towards, or has it been a more subconscious change in your subject matter? What do you think has prompted it?
GRAHAM: It's an interesting question, how they relate. It's tempting to think we can choose our way forward – intellectually, whenever we like – but I do wonder if creative changes only occur once we are in a different place, somatically, emotionally. Perhaps I have a less idealised understanding of femininity now, a little bit more balanced. I don't know. I allowed my subjectivity to take over a bit more, but without knowing exactly how that works out.
The paintings have always been therapeutic, but initially they were therapeutic in the sense of feeling nervous about being a man. Images of women seemed like a lovely world to be in. That used to mean more literal depictions of editorials from fashion magazines. But then, in time – it's hard to explain – instead of using those images like a drug, to completely zone into what that image is, like escapism. I think they're less like that now; they're more me just trying to navigate that world and work out, Why do I feel like that? Although I am happy to share these workings in exhibitions, I make these things as a way to get through life. It's just that it's necessary for me, and that's where the intensity comes from.
ALMA: Domestic objects are the carriers of meaning in these works, are the means by which you reflect on ideals of beauty and perfection. I was thinking about this recently in relation to the Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery; his still lifes show a commitment to and marvel at everyday objects that elevates them beyond just studies. Do you think of the objects in your still lifes as symbols in their own right? Or are they more like frames for absent figures, or stand-ins for them?
GRAHAM: They are the objects that intrigue me the most in relation to the subject of beauty, the ones that are part of that machinery. Some of them cause things.
ALMA: What has given your work its tension, many feel, is the surreal stillness of the figures: they are frozen while absorbed or adrift in their domestic spaces, creating a sense of anticipation and leaving us to imagine a life around the picture. You somehow achieve something similar with these inanimate objects – they are motionless, but still seem to contain the potential for movement or life. Are you reflecting on the same questions as in your earlier work, particularly your attempts to process your misunderstandings about femininity, or have those questions changed and opened onto something else?
GRAHAM: The questions are still definitely the same, and I suppose I am at another part of negotiating them, though. The stillness comes from a hope to find more peace with it all, and when I make the work or pray, it is a time that starts to feel closer to some sense of wholeness.
ALMA: You work slowly, sometimes over months. Is this meticulousness necessary to the process in a primarily material sense, or does that extended period of time also give you space to process something mentally or emotionally?
GRAHAM: It is often the decisions that take the most time, trying to define the sense of what is catching on my insides, like trying to find the ideal word to articulate a difficult thought.
ALMA: You construct your paintings from staged arrangements assembled in your studio, using cut paper, found objects gathered from the street, and imagery drawn from books in your personal collection. What are the publications you’ve found yourself returning to and using most?
GRAHAM: That's too hard to answer. I love books. They provide that generous moment to think over things while you read, which films and smartphones don't. This painting, Untitled, Garden, is my garden. And the figure was an image from a massage book, How to Massage or something from the eighties. It was one of the opening pages, just showing somebody who was trying to solve their pain in other ways. I liked the way she was almost becoming the shape of the lawnmower.
ALMA: I love this thing-within-a-thing. The paintings in this exhibition took you more than a year to finish. What were your days looking like while making them?
GRAHAM: Breakfast, always porridge. I’d start at about nine and finish about nine. I’d have a lunch hour – literally to eat a sandwich and then go back to it immediately. I find it fairly relaxing to do the work, so it's okay to keep going. I work at home with a lovely white carpet, and everything's clean and clear and simple, and it's much easier to work like that. It's just nice to feel like you're not a professional. You're just doing a hobby or something.
ALMA: Your children have sometimes been models for your work. How is that dynamic? Are there lots of interruptions?
GRAHAM: There’s lots of stuff I work from. I have three children, so it's really full on. They kind of notice I’m doing what I’m doing, but they don't notice as well. It’s not a thing. There are moments when something attracts their attention, and then they notice that, but most of the time they're just asking me to tell them where their crisps are stored, or fighting over the laptop.